Nintendo Interview

GameSpy posted an interview with Nintendo's product designer Kenichi Sugino and Shigeru Miyamoto, head of Nintendo's Entertainment Analysis and Development group:

GameSpy: I know what the answer is going to be, but I might as well ask. Have you started work on your next hardware system?

Sugino: Rather than finish one hardware system and move on to the next one, we are always in the process of developing new ideas and technologies. Take, for example, the DS. We have been working on the touch-panel technology idea for a long while. We have been working on the wireless connectivity on a separate research and development track.

What we do while we work on these different technologies is we try to figure out which ones we can apply to different video-game systems or how we can incorporate them into a hand-held system. We look for ways that will not only expand the system, but also expand the software and make that better.

Instead of it being a more staged set from one machine to the next, it's an amalgam of several research and development tracks going on. We evaluate what we can pull from our research and how best to match that into a new hardware system.